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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Oh sure - I have no doubt of that.
I don't think he has either the brains or the attention span to play a long game. I say often (and did obliquely in that last post) that he has the emotional development of a spoiled five-year-old. That's not just a derisive turn of phrase. He really does. He never outgrew that stage when he was taking toys away from the other kids in kindergarten and saying, "Mine!"
So yeah - I don't doubt for a second that he's sincerely trying to distance himself (at least publicly) from those fucking Project 2025 Christofascists. They're making him look bad, and he can't abide that.
The rather obvious and entirely predictable lie is that it never had anything to do with him.
That and the implication that they still won't have anything to do with him should he win. I would absolutely guarantee that if he wins, he's going to follow their playbook to the letter, because it (likely not coincidentally) will give him exactly what he wants - absolute power with which to impose his will and punish his enemies.
Absolute power to take toys away from the other kids in kindergarten and say "Mine!"
You're not giving him nearly enough credit. Look at Trump before he was into politics, the motley fool's run-in is particularly great:
https://www.fool.com/archive/portfolios/rulebreaker/2001/02/07/donald-trump-let-us-down.aspx
https://www.fool.com/podcasts/rule-breaker-investing/2016-08-03-i-own-the-water-a-fool-s-brush-with/
He's a salesman, a jawboner. A darn good one, and one who knows how to work a barely legal scheme. Calling him a total idiot is probably the biggest mistake the Democratic Party as a whole makes.
I don't think your point and mine contradict each other.
I likely should've clarified it a bit more, but I specified the long game because that, IMO, is the significant bit.
Trump is absolutely a master manipulator, and it's absolutely the case that the Dems have underestimated him, to their detriment.
But I think it's far more likely that that ability is more in the nature of a natural talent honed over a lifetime. He notoriously has a startlingly short attention span and a complete lack of interest in anything other than whatever concerns him at the moment.
So, for instance, I think that he's distancing himself from Project 2025 simply because he recognized that they were making him look bad, and that at most he assured himself that if/when it came to it, after he'd managed to finagle the win on which he's laser-focused, he could revisit the idea of following their roadmap. Then he stopped thinking about it entirely.
Again, that's why I stipulated the long game. I just don't think that's the way his mind works. To the contrary, he appears to be entirely in the moment, feeding whoever he's talking to whatever they need to hear so that he can get whatever it is that he wants from them, right then and there.
On a bit of a side note, I actually worked with a guy much like the Trump the Motley Fool article describes, and it was uncanny. I could stand there listening to him, knowing full well in some corner of my mind that he was almost certainly lying, and still find myself, as if I was hypnotized, nodding and agreeing with everything he said. And I wasn't the only one - most notably, he was fired and rehired at least four times of which I was aware, and the owner once confided in me that every time he fired him, he swore that was it, then every time he came back, he'd just find himself rehiring him again, as if he couldn't even control his own actions.
To this day, I have no idea how he did it, but it undeniably worked.